I wind down by watching T90, chat with my gf, go to sleep, wake up, exchange more loving messages with her, take a shower, cuddle my cat, sit down to have a nice breakfast, and check fedi on Husky.
the entire "gamergate 2" situation is summarized really well as "these men are all convinced that video games are being made less sexy when there has never been a better time to buy porn on steam. They are just chasing the feeling of being a 14 year old boy seeing boobs in a pg13 movie"
woman has a mole JESUS CHRIST THE LIBS ARE MAKING WOMEN UNFUCKABLE
YOU KNOW, YOU KNOW, THIS IS WHAT I SAY FOLKS THE FROGS ARE GAY NOW YOU DI- YOU DIDN'T LISTEN, AND NOW FROGS ARE COMING, TO FUCK YOUR KIDS
I'm pretty sure BG3 had a lot of women working on it who you'd classify as SJW.
I've actually gotten to personally know one of the more prominent ones (over the Internet) and chat with her for a while. A public figure who's appeared in some promotional material. (She now hates me for reasons you wouldn't believe because it's such a long and crazy story...) We haven't talked politics much but I'm pretty sure she's very SJW-ish. Goes by they/them pronouns.
(Disclaimer: I don't actually know with 100% certainty that the person I got to know over the Internet was the Larian employee I'm thinking of, because they never outright admitted it. But it was like 99.9% obvious, lol.)
Let me tell you how I explain BG3:
No matter how "powerful" SJW-type ideologies are in the media industry at this point, the "sex sells" principle is still a thousand times more powerful. And it's mostly driven by sexual objectification of women, though men are being increasingly included (e.g. Halsin) which allows the studios to keep up a woke image despite the otherwise obvious sexism.
The only people who don't include any sexy female characters in their media are indie devs who have very peculiar target audiences, and maybe some studios that lie on such huge piles of cash that they don't really care and just experiment with different things / chase temporary political trends because their PR department suggested it.
And even if that's true of some big studios, they don't actually make "ugly" female characters anyway. They just make female characters who look ever so slightly less like an animated sex doll than what the average male gamer has been used to until recently. Just look at that stupid nonsense where gamers were losing their minds because a woman living in a post apocalyptic world has some fuzz on her face. (Forgot the name of the game. You know the one. The "Amazon" looking woman with the bow hunting down robots.)
Not gonna lie, the side by side comparison made me LOL.
Still, I have to ask: Have you ever met any women, like in real life? I guess you'd faint if you saw female Olympic lifters.
Also, when I google this character, I see 90% pics that are a lot more attractive. What you posted was apparently not the final design, which perfectly makes my point for me: the moment gamers screech about a female character not being sufficiently sexy, the studio will cave and give them what they want.
Sexist ideology nonsense still wins over "feminist ideology nonsense" in the media industry.
> Olympics lifters or competitive weightlifters are extremely abnormal
And I wasn't suggesting them as examples of normal women. I was saying you'd probably faint if you saw a real woman who's actually extremely muscular, which Aloy from Horizon is far from.
Aloy looks completely normal even in the cutscene you shared, which is a cherry-picked unflattering one. Attached are 4 pics that I assume are also in-game scenes showing her from more neutral perspective. If you think this is egregiously ugly character design, then you just have coomer goggles on.
And I'm not even touching any of the promo material / alternative designs / etc. of her.
> No it doesn't, we already went through this, there's several industries, journos, media, etc. to push this nonsense.
And yet BG3 won game of the year, in part by appealing to coomers. All those shady conspiracies to make female characters "ugly" and yet the entire industry is swooning over a game that made them extremely sexy and specifically used that for marketing. (Just balancing it out by including an equal amount of straight female / gay male fan service, so they can keep up their faux-progressive image.)
> The industry and ideology is currently entirely cynical and mostly goes against nature
Kawaii uguu anime girls aren't nature, mate. Aloy looks like a 100% normal natural-looking female human being.
> and what most of the players actually want
Most of the players are coomers, is my whole point. The studios have a choice between pandering to coomers and pandering to wokies and they do what they think will make them the most money. Simple as.
> You're literally currently cheerleading the popular bourgeois ideology, the ideology which is currently extremely hostile to anything not adhering to it
You're not even hearing my argument. Yes there are people who want to make representation of female characters in media ever so slightly less sexually objectified. Call that an evil feminazi conspiracy if you want, or call it the popular bourgeois ideology.
My point is that seeing them as evil powerful shady overlords ruining video games is completely stupid, given how little power they actually have. A studio decides to make a female character that merely looks normal instead of a CGI sex doll, and they get dragged through the fucking mud for it.
> Who votes for game of the year in the games awards? Journos, not the public in general. IIRC the public voting stuff are a mere %
So you're telling me it was not just the coomer public but even the journos themselves who voted for a game whose promo material made people think it's a fetish porn sim? Thank you for further strengthening my argument.
> This is the weirdest fucking argument. BG3 got popular by being an actually good game for once as far as I'm aware
The fanbase is EXTREMELY sex obsessed and they heavily leaned into this during marketing. They had a promo video where the buff himbo guy literally shapeshifts into a bear to have sex with the vampire twink. People are doing sex% speedruns. They have motion capped sex scenes. You can have an incest threesome with a pair of twin prostitutes. BG3 is coomer paradise.
Don't get me wrong, it's a great game. (I'm the founder of the BG3 wiki, which I started during Early Access.) But half of the viral popularity is from the sexual content, and it's extremely obvious that they made sure to have super sexy female main characters because many of the fans wouldn't like it any other way.
Shadowheart is the typical innocent (brainwashed by an evil cult) coy / tsundere fair lady, and Karlach is the oomph sexy "child bearing hips" momma. And I guess Minthara is the dominatrix or something. Don't ask me about Lae'zel; I guess some people are frogsexual. :cate:
I wouldn't even necessarily say the game has bad female representation per se, but the appeal to straight men is extremely obvious. They just justify it by adding tons of fan service for women and gay men as well, and I guess giving the female characters some actual personality even if they're partly designed to fulfill male fantasies.
TL;DR: You can try to go fully feminist (or "woke") and only have female characters who aren't sexualised, but your game won't be nearly as popular. Neither with the public, nor within the journalism part of the video game industry. The industry knows this very well, and is usually trying to balance things so they can appease both camps, like BG3 managed to.
> > Aloy looks like a 100% normal natural-looking female human being
> No she does not
Yes she fucking does and you need to take your pills.
> Are you seriously implying that the western industry as it is right now caters to coomers????? Are you freaking serious?
Yes. [insert gigachad]
> They have so little power that currently they're about to trigger gamergate 2.0 for what amounts of a small DEI creative consulting group, that has also consulted for massive AAA games
And yet they appease coomers most of the time. In part because even these SJW groups consist 50% of coomers themselves.
Grand TL;DR before I quit the thread:
The so called "feminist" conspiracy ruining muh vidya gamez is really mostly just faux progressives hooked on queer theory (that's a whole other can of worms I haven't really touched on here), half of them are coomers themselves, and they barely manage to make some female characters less extremely sexualised. You think they're turning all women in video games into egregiously ugly monstrosities because you're wearing ultra-coomer goggles that make you lose your mind when you see a female video game character who doesn't look like a literal sex doll. The fact that you think Aloy looks "unnatural," or super ugly somehow, is proof positive that you need to touch grass and take your pills.
Go take your pills, schizo. What does the link you shared even have to do with me? Even that link itself seems to agree that lolicons are pedos. So you agree with me then?
I don't know anything about BlackRock or Vanguard, but I would say that the problem you're describing is an entirely organic one, spreading through all of society, and thus happens to have reached parts of the financial elite as well, creating the misconception that it may be an entirely "top-down" thing, when it isn't. Not that it really matters, since a movement can be grassroots and still evil, but I guess it sends a lot of people into a righteous frenzy when they convince themselves that this is something done to "the poor innocent masses" by "the strong and powerful elite."
This philosophy of deconstructing all past norms and traditions is one that, as far as I know, sprang out of a number of post WW2 European (mainly French) philosophers, such as Michel Foucault. It probably first started to spread through academia, in particular the Humanities, and still does so to a significant degree from what I gather.
I guess "post modernism" (or "post structuralism") and "queer theory" would be the keywords, though they've become sort of buzzwords / bogeyman terms, so maybe those terms are better avoided.
It does contain motivations of genuine justice and equity, which is probably why the philosophy spread into many other areas of society. You could be a working class woman from a marginalized ethic group, or you could be a white man born into a family that's part of the financial elite, and you're going to be almost equally likely to join this philosophy, because it's considered morally good, although your interpretations would probably significantly differ.
Digression: Heck, it may actually be more likely that disprivileged people join the philosophy, since its stated goal is to shift power structures for the better, but that may be offset by the fact that the stated goal is often not worked towards in a meaningful way, and it easily turns into something that privileged people join to feel better about themselves, and end up just shuffling power structures between different already powerful groups, like white middle class western (faux-)liberals vs. white middle class western (faux-)conservatives.
Anyhow, @coolboymew was definitely attributing the problem to "feminism" earlier. He and a number of others are also arguing that a number of female characters who are quite attractive (even by conventional norms), or at the very least average looking, are somehow examples of egregious ugliness. So those are the two things I'm mainly arguing against:
First, this philosophy is not a genuinely feminist one --not even close-- because it's controlled to a large degree (and has always been, from the beginning) by a number of men who are highly interested in having all their sexual desires met without limit or self constraint, and thus without any consideration of the well being of others. Michel Foucault literally led a petition in the 70's to completely abolish all age of consent laws in France. These men's idea of "shifting power structures" involves convincing women into becoming publicly owned sex objects (also see "sex work is just work" rhetoric) and many of them even want access to children as well.
They want to claim feminism, gay rights, anti racism, and so on, but insist on making the normalisation of sexual deviancy a core part of the overall philosophy. Feminism, gay rights, and anti racism have, obviously, absolutely nothing to do with sexual deviancy at their core.
Secondly, some people in this thread think that women are ugly unless they look like children or sex dolls. (Oh and unless they're white; more on that in a bit.) It's ironic how they rail against this philosophy while it so closely aligns with their own sexual deviancy. The reason seems to be that they passionately hate other aspects of the philosophy. For example, the "RTX OFF / RTX ON" image is just 100% blatant racism. The obsession over women's facial structure probably arises from an irrational fear of women's natural bodies. Just standard misogyny, really. I was going to elaborate a bit more on this point, but my battery is running low... The queer philosophy or whatever sexually objectifies women in a way different from them, I guess, and they can't tolerate that because they want women to be objectified in exactly the way they're used to, and no other way.
Yes I'm sure that women, who are approximately 50% of society, are much more likely to buy video games that represent them as nothing other than soulless animated sex dolls.
I'm sure that Baldur's Gate 3 walking on a tightrope to both include very sexy female characters, while making sure not to outright dehumanise them had nothing to do with its financial success.
I'm sure it would have sold even more copies if all the female characters had just been soulless fan service for ultra-coomers who can't bear to see a realistic attractive woman in their vidya games.
I'm sure it's a very good business strategy to appeal only to fringe ultra-coomers, who lose their fucking minds when the sexy woman on their screen doesn't have the face of a 12 year old, instead of appealing to the more common average Joe Coomer who's satisfied so long as the female character has great tits.
This is definitely all a big feminist conspiracy and your expectations of female characters in media are totally normal and sane. You are definitely very smart.
Have you considered that maybe the evil soulless corporations are simply seeing massive untapped sales number potential in making their media, that formerly had an extremely male-dominated fan base, appeal to women as well?
> Is that actually a good reason to shit on the previous customer?
They're not doing that. Some of the previous customers are just such massive man children that they lose their minds over nothing.
Have you ever watched a video from Anita Sarkeesian back in the day? The woman was sitting there politely expressing her opinion. That made her get murder threats. Because porn addicted men have brain damage.
So, the self righteous liberal men who are ever so slightly less extreme in their coomerism jumped in and made it into a culture war between overtly anti-feminist coomer extremists and faux-progressive fake feminist coomer liberals.
The real feminists never even got close to receiving mainstream support. It's all just "sex work is work" and "stop kink shaming" and "suck my girl dick, TERF!" Guess whose side Sarkeesian is on now. She wanted to remain relevant and popular, so she joined the liberal men's ideologies.
(At least, last I've heard from her, that was the case. Must have been at least two or three years now that I saw her tweeting shit at "TERFs" but I haven't heard from her since.)
> And it just so happens that all of this shit mysteriously happened during a massive feminists push, very very strange, it's almost like you're going in circle right into my initial argument
It's almost like there is a thing called "Zeitgeist" in society, which describes current cultural and political trends.
BTW if anyone wants to follow me on BlueSky, I'm @taylankammer over there ... for now. If the platform picks off, I'll probably make my own domain. Otherwise I'll just abandon it.
I'm not married to the Fediverse, given how censorious the culture here is. Of course, BlueSky is likely to be no better.
I was refactoring some code and realized I painted myself into a corner by trying to make it more "functional", got discouraged and am walking away for a little while from it.
@RustyCrab@alex@Moon Agreed. In the Android/Java code I've written in the last 5 years I've not used getters/setters unless they implemented some logic beyond reading/writing a field. Some corpo devs would probably lose their minds over it, but it's probably not even uncommon among more seasoned Java devs...
@RustyCrab@alex@Moon I don't remember the details of Lua's type system but if you have strongly/strictly typed dynamic language, like Lisp/Scheme, I don't think it's a problem... I haven't written any really large codebase in such languages though; maybe my opinion would change if I did.
Could it be that the main problem with Lua is that "objects" are all just tables, so there isn't even really a thing such as a "field" of an object? (Similar to JS, where one can arbitrarily add new "properties" to objects, so objects are really just glorified hash tables.) In Scheme, one would define a "record type" for such cases, which has a well-defined and limited number of named fields.
